Hospital giants went before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and showed why Washington’s health care affordability debate should start with the hospital industry. The system pays hospitals more, taxes many of them less, shields them from competition, and then asks patients and taxpayers to cover the bill. The hearing featured CEOs from some of the nation’s largest health systems, including major for-profit and tax-exempt hospital chains. Under questioning from Ways and

Health care fraud is not a paperwork problem. It is a taxpayer rip-off that drains money from patients who need care, providers who follow the rules, and workers who fund the system. At Paragon Health Institute’s National Press Club event, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz laid out the scale of the challenge facing federal health programs. Dr. Oz estimated health care fraud at about $100 billion per year and warned that fraud in Medicare,

The Labor Department just delivered a major win for 401(k) workers, retirees, and Main Street investors. Under the guidance, proxy advisory firms can be treated as fiduciaries under ERISA when they exercise control over shareholder voting rights or provide paid advice to retirement plans about how to vote. That means these firms cannot use other people’s retirement money to push ESG, DEI, or other political agendas. They must act for the financial benefit of workers and retir

Congress should stop treating the Highway Trust Fund like a slush fund. The fund was created to support roads and bridges, paid for largely by drivers through the gas tax. But new analysis from EPIC for America’s David Ditch shows that in fiscal year 2024, roughly $22.4 billion of Highway Trust Fund spending, or 30.1 percent of the total, was diverted away from the nation’s core highway system. Reform should be a top priority when Congress writes the next highway bill in 2026

The Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center should force a broader reckoning over how much power corporations gave one activist group to police the nonprofit world. The charges are allegations, and SPLC is entitled to defend itself in court. But the indictment raises a basic question that conservatives have been asking for years: why was SPLC treated as a trusted gatekeeper for charities, platforms, and public debate in the first place? DOJ Alleges

The 340B drug discount program was supposed to help low-income patients get cheaper prescription drugs. Instead, it has become a taxpayer-subsidized profit center for large nonprofit hospital networks that buy drugs at steep discounts, bill insurers and government programs at higher rates, and keep the spread. The Washington Post editorial board’s new op-ed calls the program what it has too often become: corporate welfare for hospitals. The Center for a Free Economy and more

The Center for a Free Economy has been highlighting how the Working Families Tax Cuts are delivering broad relief for workers, families, seniors, small businesses, and family-owned farms. Through a growing series of short videos tied to CFE blog posts, CFE has explained how the law lowers taxes on tips and overtime, strengthens the Child Tax Credit and standard deduction, expands education choice, improves Health Savings Accounts, provides auto loan relief for American-built

The 2008 housing collapse showed what happens when mortgage risk is ignored, understated, or pushed onto someone else. A new DC Journal op-ed by Ryan Ellis warns that Washington should not weaken one of the basic safeguards that helps lenders understand borrower risk before a mortgage is approved: tri-merge credit reporting. Tri-merge credit reporting requires lenders to review credit reports from all three national credit bureaus when underwriting a mortgage. That full view

A new Brookings Institution chart book by Jessica Riedl delivers a blunt warning for Washington: the federal budget problem is being driven by spending, not a lack of tax revenue. The charts show that even extremely aggressive tax hikes would fall far short of stabilizing the long-term budget, while higher tax rates on work, investment, and business would threaten growth and competitiveness. The Math Does Not Support a Tax-Hike-Only Strategy The most striking chart shows that

A new national poll released by the American Property Owners Alliance shows voters are ready for Congress to fix one of the most outdated parts of the tax code: the capital gains tax on home sales. The survey, conducted by OnMessage Public Strategies, found that 70% of voters oppose the current capital gains tax on home sales, including majorities across the political spectrum. The poll also found that 82% of Americans support adjusting the tax to account for inflation, with

Millions of Americans are paying taxes on gains they never chose to realize, and Congress has a clear opportunity to end this unfair treatment. The “Generating Retirement Ownership Through Long-Term Holding Act,” or “GROWTH Act,” H.R. 2089 and S. 1839, would fix one of the stranger features of the tax code by allowing mutual fund investors to defer taxes on reinvested capital gain distributions until they actually sell their shares. In a recent op-ed in The Hill , CFE Presid

Massachusetts taxpayers just received a costly reminder of why welfare reform cannot stop at writing bigger checks. According to Massachusetts Daily News , a new Fiscal Alliance Foundation study found that Massachusetts paid out more than $1 billion in improper SNAP payments between 2022 and 2024 while as many as 75% of able-bodied recipients were not working. That scale of waste should concern anyone who wants the safety net to work for the people who truly need it. Food sta

Social Security was created in 1935 as a hedge against “poverty-ridden old age.” That mission is hard to square with the system Washington runs now. A couple claiming the maximum benefit at age 70 can receive about $124,000 a year in Social Security, even as younger and generally poorer workers keep paying payroll taxes into a program projected to hit insolvency in 2032. That is not a focused safety net. It is a sign that Social Security has drifted far from its original purp

Affordability keeps getting worse in many states for a simple reason: government spending has grown far faster than taxpayers’ ability to support it. Vance Ginn recently pointed to a clear benchmark for fiscal discipline, and the numbers make the case. From 2016 to 2025, aggregate state spending excluding federal transfers rose 65.8%, while the sustainable benchmark of population growth plus inflation rose just 32.4%. That gap helps explain why so many states keep talking ab

The first filing season under the Working Families Tax Cuts is already showing what certainty and tax relief look like in practice. Families and businesses no longer have to guess whether key parts of the tax code will vanish after one more election cycle. The law made major tax relief permanent, and now millions of Americans are seeing the results in their returns, refunds, deductions, and long-term planning. According to new Treasury Department data , the first tax season u

Tax season is when tax policy stops being abstract. Small business owners see it in what they owe, what they can deduct, and how much they can reinvest in the future. That made the recent podcast featuring CFE President Ryan Ellis and Brian Reardon of the S-Corporation Association especially timely, as the two discussed how the Working Families Tax Cuts improved the tax code for small and family-owned businesses. The conversation focused on the parts of the law that do the m

Tax Day is one of the most dreaded days of the year. This year, it also came with a reminder of what Congress prevented. If the family and business tax relief enacted in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act had expired, American households would now be facing a broad and immediate tax increase. Instead, The Working Families Tax Cuts stopped what could have been one of the largest tax hikes in decades. What Congress Prevented Had that 2017 tax relief expired, taxpayers would have fa

Washington can project 3% real GDP growth for the next decade. That does not make it plausible. If the labor force is barely growing , the only way to hit that kind of sustained economic growth is to assume an extraordinary, long-running surge in productivity. That is not serious budgeting. It is wishcasting. The Trump budget leans on roughly 3% real GDP growth for years to come. But the economy does not grow by magic. Real growth comes from more workers, more output per work

Democrats still talk as if tax relief for working families mainly helps the rich. The facts point in the other direction. Data from the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and the latest IRS data summarized by Tax Foundation show that lower-income Americans receive larger percentage tax relief, while higher earners continue to pay the highest tax rates and the largest share of federal income taxes. That matters because the fairness debate around tax policy is often driven mo

California’s latest hospice crackdown is not an isolated scandal. It is another sign that Gavin Newsom’s California has become an epicenter of government waste, fraud, and corruption, with Medicaid standing at the center of the problem. Federal officials have now suspended 221 hospice and healthcare providers in Los Angeles over suspected fraud, and they say that number is likely to keep rising. That should not surprise anyone who has watched California pour more money into